October Suite. (fiction reviews).

OCTOBER SUITE By Maxine Clair Random House, October 2001, $23.95 ISBN 0-375-50630-6

In October Suite, Maxine Clair reprises the character of October Brown, who we encountered in Clair's astonishing 1994 short story collection, Rattlebone, winner of the Chicago Tribune's Heartland Prize for Fiction and the American Library Association's Black Caucus Award for 1995. In Rattlebone, we see the feisty October Brown only obliquely--through the eyes of school children wary of the splotch of white vitiligo on her chocolate-smooth cheek that they call her "devil's kiss." One child in particular, Irene Wilson, has reason to resent October.

Brown, the pretty young schoolteacher who seduces her father and causes her family's life to unravel in ways young Irene can't quite understand.

October Suite is another gorgeously written, quietly told heartland tale; one that tells a more sympathetic version of October Brown's story. When first we meet her, October has come to live with other teachers at a rooming house in 1950s Missouri. On her own for the first time, October has an older sister, Vergie. Both girls were raised by kindly spinster aunts after their father murdered their mother. October was just a small child when it happened, and the events of that day swirl with surreal and painful confusion in her memory, a confusion deepened by her aunts' admonition that the girls never mention the murder.

But October cannot forget. Haunted by the past yet unable to ask the questions that might help her put the tragedy to rest, she grows into a beautiful but wounded young woman. She takes the name October for the month that is witness to "the brief and flaming brilliance of everything at the climax of life, moving towards death." It's no surprise that she is reckless, impatient with love. Love, after all, is dangerous, marked by unruly passions. She soon falls for a handsome, sweet-talking handyman, James Wilson, who introduces her to the music called jazz that is rippling across the heartland. Despite learning that lames is married, and that his daughter is in her class, October rushes headlong into an affair, sure that James will eventually yield to the dictates of true love. But she becomes pregnant, and James deserts her. Heartbroken, October returns to her family to have the baby. There, in a moment of despair, she gives the child to her childless sister Vergie and her husband, only to discover almost immediately that she has made a horrible mistake. How October eventually comes to terms with her history and reclaims the son she has given away, is at the heart of this sensitive and authentically rendered tale. Once again, Maxine Clair has crafted an exquisite story of family with all its tender and violent devotions, and of a willful woman who learns the necessity of forgiveness, finding at last the truth she has sought all along.

Rosemarie Robotham is an editor at Essence magazine. She is the author of the novel Zachary's Wings, co-author of Spirits of Passage: The Transatlantic Slave Trade in the Seventeenth Century, and editor of the literary anthology The Bluelight Corner: Black Women in Writing on Passion, Sex and Romantic Love.